This disclosure relates generally to maintaining information describing online system users, and more particularly to classifying online system users based on their propensity for adopting innovations in a subject area.
An online system allows users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities, such as corporations or charities. Content items are presented to various users by the online system to encourage users to interact with the online system.
With the increasing popularity of online systems, such as a social networking system, the online systems periodically add new features and/or new versions of existing features to improve the experience of its users. It is important for the online system that the newly introduced features actually improve the user experience especially when the new features replace existing features. While the online systems typically test the new features to ensure that they meet sufficient quality metrics, new features tend to have bugs especially in the first couple of releases.
Conventionally, an online system provides new features or new versions of existing features to various users of the online system once the new features or new versions are available. However, this conventional practice does not account for different tolerance levels of different users for changes or modifications to products or services used by different users when deciding whether to provide various new features to different users. By providing new features or versions to users regardless of the users' tolerance for changes or modifications, many users with low tolerance for change will have a degraded user experience from adapting to new features or when new features perform sub-optimally. Degradation of various users' experiences may increase the risk of users who are frustrated by new features reducing their interaction with the online system.